Existing messaging technologies have evolved from traditional concepts such as “messages” and “mail.” It is for this reason that such technologies are limited in flexibility and adaptability, as they have been specifically designed to support a particular modality. As new messaging protocols, formats and products become available, existing technologies are in constant “catch up” as they attempt to adapt to an ever-accelerating product development cycle.
Various software tools allow individuals to collaborate on adding information to documents. For example, the “SharePoint” software suite available from Microsoft Corporation allows individuals to collaborate on documents. Another software collaboration tool is “WebOffice” by WebEx. While each of these tools provide collaboration, they and other prior art are lacking as described below.
Currently available software for collaborating on documents does not take full advantage of the ability to share information. For example, most software tools are limited to providing the ability to annotate a written document with text or simple drawing tools, or limited to adding supportive documents, calendars or scheduling. These tools do not allow the user to use feature sets of rich media interaction, nor use rich media trails for collaboration. One cannot leave voice on a document along with video and snapshots of pertinent web site information. Further, these tools do not have the ability to let other users leave their rich media interactions.
Further, the sheer volume of electronic mail and the reliance upon e-mail for conducting business poses problems for users. For example, e-mail spam is annoying at the least, limits on e-mail storage cause problems, limits on the size of e-mail messages and attachments that may be sent cause frustration (and these limits are not a reasonable way of communicating in the new rich digital age), and the types of e-mail modules and webmail programs available for use confuse users. One basic difficulty with e-mail is that it is an unauthenticated transport scheme. In other words, no one can ever really know who is behind a particular e-mail address, hence the existence of spam and address spoofing, which leads to virus problems as well as phishing scams and fraud. None of the currently available software tools for collaboration provide an adequate solution to all of these e-mail problems.
Finally, current collaboration software does not provide adequate scalability needed for adding and authenticating thousands of users or for storing nearly unlimited quantities of information. Today, if an organization needs to scale what they are doing, the organization needs to come up with a combination of disparate software and hardware modules in order to keep up with the amount of data to be stored and accessed. This use of disparate software and hardware causes issues in the data center, introduces many points of failure within the network and is not a cost effective way to keep growing.